Category: Artificial Intelligence

ASSC16, Brighton, UK, July 02-06 2012

The 16th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness

http://www.theassc.org/conferences/assc_16 We are delighted to announce that the 16th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness will take place in Brighton, UK, from July 02-06, 2012.

The meeting will be organized by the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex (www.sussex.ac.uk/sackler). Brighton, affectionately known as ‘London by the sea’ is a popular international conference destination. It is only 49 minutes by train from central London and just 30 minutes from Gatwick International Airport (LGW; there are also easy transport links from Heathrow). Brighton is a small city (population ~500,000) with conference facilities, hotels, restaurants, pubs, transport links, and the beach all within easy walking distance. The city is well known for its vibrant scientific, artistic, and digital communities, its café and pub society, and the beauty of the surrounding countryside (the South Downs National Park is just a couple of miles to the north). And in July, the weather is also usually very good as well! For more information on Brighton, see www.visitbrighton.org.

To ensure that ASSC16 is special, we have arranged for it to be held in the superb Dome and Corn Exchange theatre complex, in the heart of Brighton’s artistic quarter (http://www.brightondome.org/) and is only minutes from the beach. These heritage buildings date from the early 19th century and were recently refurbished in a £2,000,000 project to provide an unparalled combination of elegance and efficiency. With the support of the city, we are confident that ASSC16 will not only be a premier scientific meeting, but a citywide celebration of consciousness science.

We already have an exciting line-up of keynote speakers for 2012: Victor Lamme (University of Amsterdam), Tim Bayne (University of Oxford), Tania Singer (University of Zurich), Geraint Rees (University College London), and Josef Perner (University of Salzburg). We are also delighted to announce a ‘special lecture’ from Christof Koch (Caltech).

In a major change from previous ASSC meetings, ASSC16 will take place over four full days, plus one tutorial day, and will run from Monday to Friday instead of across a weekend. We have made these changes in order to ensure that excellent scientific content can be combined with enough time for discussion, poster viewing, and the like. We do not expect registration fees to be substantially affected. We should also point out that the ASSC16 dates do NOT clash with the London Olympics!Calls for proposals for tutorials and symposia will shortly be available on http://www.theassc.org/conferences/assc_16 with a submission deadline of October 30, 2011. On behalf of the local organizing committee, we look forward to welcoming you to Brighton in 2012!

Searle on the Mind-Body Problem

The following video is a short excerpt from an interview to John Searle about his book Intentionality and Minds, Brains and Science.

Will computers ever achieve consciousness? John Searle, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at U.C. Berkeley and author of Intentionality and Minds, Brains and Science. He challenges the notion that the human mind operates like a computer, pointing out that intentionality and other human faculties are not achievable through artificial intelligence.

‘IMPACTS AND RISKS OF ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE’
(AGI IMPACTS 2012)

The first conference on the Impacts and Risks of Artificial General Intelligence will take place at the University of Oxford, St. Anne’s College, on December 10th and 11th, 2012 – immediately following the fifth annual conference on Artificial General Intelligence AGI-12 (http://agi-conf.org/2012). AGI-Impacts is organized by the “Future of Humanity Institute” (FHI) at Oxford University through its “Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology”. The two events form the Winter Intelligence Multi-Conference 2012, hosted by FHI.http://www.winterintelligence.org

The conference will explore questions such as: How can we best predict the impact of as future intelligent and superintelligent machines? How can we combine ideas from computer science, mathematics and philosophy to best estimate this impact? What will be the impacts of AGI on the world? Which directions of research should be most explored, and which should be de-emphasized or avoided? What can we do to best ensure scientific rigour in this non-experimental academic field? What are the best ideas and methods for ensuring both safety and predictability of advanced AI systems? Can we lay the foundations to a field of rigorous study of realistic AGI control methods that lead to implementable security protocols?

The scope is wide, but all papers are expected to be of high quality and with the maximal amount of rigour that is possible for the subject area. We envisage publication of selected submissions in a special journal issue.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind, known as the BICA Challenge, calls for our joint efforts to develop biologically-inspired intelligent agents that can be accepted and trusted by the human society in various roles, on an equal footing with human agents. The main objective of BICA 2012 is to take a significant step forward towards the BICA Challenge.

“Cognition and Consciousness” Retecog Summer School 2012

The Retecog Network fosters interdisciplinary collaboration to promote the advancement of Cognitive Science in Spain. This summer school aims to offer an overview of research in Cognitive Science through the choice of an area of research which provides a clear demonstration of the potential benefits of multidisciplinary cross-fertilization. It is addressed to graduate students, or recent doctors, interested in gaining a broader view of their research topic, and benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration. Participants are expected to present their current projects, either as poster or oral presentation, and will be offered feedback and further support.

Participants

The Summer School is addressed primarily to graduate students and recent doctors related to the groups that constitute the Retecog network. They will have their travel and accommodation expenses covered. Number of places is 25. Non-members of the network can also apply; they will just have the accommodation covered.

Inscription

Contact toni dot gomila -at- uib dot cat before the end of April.Tutorials

Tutorials will be offered by members of Retecog.Net. They will be introductory, 2-hour sessions, which will provide a quick access to a specific problem related to consciousness. Each student will be able to choose 6, among a those offered. At this moment, confirmed tutorials are:

The 12th International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (www.Robotica2012.org/EC) is an international scientific meeting in the field of autonomous robotics, and related areas, which will take place in conjunction with the 12th Portuguese Robotics Open, a RoboCup Local Event.

As in previous years, we expect the conference to get the Technical co-sponsorship of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The conference will be held in the beautiful city of Guimarães, Portugal, on April 11, 2012. Guimarães is the cradle of Portugal, is classified by UNESCO as Worldwide Heritage, and is the European Capital of Culture 2012 (http://www.guimaraes2012.pt/index.php?lang=2 ).

Submissions are invited for a special session on Advances in Cognitive and Emotional Information Processing (ACEIP) to be held within the 2012 International Symposium on Neural Networks (ISNN), taking place from 11th to 14th July in Shenyang (China).

ABSTRACT
Cognitive and Emotional Information Processing techniques have encountered a large success within the scientific community, specially due to the impact they naturally have in diverse application fields as commerce, tourism, education and health. A wide number of advanced solutions have been proposed on purpose spanning from User/Web Interfaces and Mobile Computing to Robotics, Ambient Intelligence, and Computer Support to Collaborative Work/Learning. The objective is devoted to adequately interpret humans’ opinions, tastes and needs and consequently provide not only useful direct feedback to them but also a valid and natural support to the interactions they can have between themselves and with smart cooperative environments. This asks for development of expert systems, able to manage large amount of information coming from sensory activity, to intelligently process it, and to promptly and knowledgeably respond to human actions according to natural interaction standards and by means of suitable actuary devices. Information processing therefore plays a central role from this perspective, operating at different levels, from multimodal digital data manipulation to semantic metadata processing, and necessarily encompassing the most challenging computational intelligence paradigms for contextual adaptation, social-emotional competence, and cognitive reasoning abilities. Moreover, if on one hand the distillation of knowledge from such type data is a key factor for most of the applications it must be also said on the other hand that the extremely unstructured nature of these contents and their exponentially growing size make it a very difficult task to be faced. Information scientists working in related areas such as multimedia, machine learning, knowledge management, affective computing or semantic web are invited to contribute to attain the above research aims, by sharing their expertise in this emerging interdisciplinary field, and at the same time paving the way to new exciting research topics in the cognitive and emotional information processing field.

TIMEFRAME
• February 15th, 2012: Due date for Special Session papers
• April 1st, 2012: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
• May 1st, 2012: Camera-ready of accepted papers
• July 11th, 2012: Special Session date

SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers (6-8 pages normally and 10 pages maximum) by the submission deadline through the online submission system. The submission of a paper implies that the paper is original and has not been submitted under review or copyright protected elsewhere and will be presented by an author if accepted. All submitted papers will be refereed by experts in the field based on the criteria of originality, significance, quality, and clarity. The authors of accepted papers will have an opportunity to revise their papers and take consideration of the referees’ comments and suggestions. All papers accepted by and presented at BICS 2012 will be published by Springer as multiple volumes of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence which will be indexed by EI and ISTP. Selected papers will be published in special issues of several SCI journals.

2012 The Alan Turing Year

A Centenary Celebration of the Life and Work of Alan Turing

June 23, 2012, is the Centenary of Alan Turing’s birth in London. During his relatively brief life, Turing made a unique impact on the history of computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability. See http://www.turingcentenary.eu/ for more details and related events around the world.

ReteCog.Net 2011 Workshop
The Architectures of Mind

ReteCog 2011 is centered around the major topic of COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE. Unveiling the architecture of the mind is a cornerstone of all our research programmes. The workshop aims to bring together leading scholars, scientists and engineers who use analytic and synthetic methods both to understand the astonishing processing properties of biological systems, specifically those of the living brain, and to exploit such knowledge to advance engineering methods for building artificial systems with higher levels of cognitive competence.

ReteCog 2011 is a meeting point of mind theorists, cognitive systems engineers and brain scientists where cross-domain ideas are fostered in the hope of getting new emerging insights on the nature, operation and extractable capabilities of brains and minds. This multiple approach is necessary because the progressively more accurate data about brains is producing a growing need of both a quantitative and deep theoretical understanding and an associated capacity to manipulate these data and translate it into engineering applications rooted in sound theories. ReteCog 2011 is intended for both i) life scientists who use and develop mathematical and engineering approaches for a better, system-level understanding of the cognitive behavior of complex biological systems and ii) technology researchers that aim to understand and build systems with higher cognitive competences. ReteCog 2011 is organized to foster collaboration patterns that encourage cross-fertilization across the workshop domains topics. This emphasizes the role of ReteCog.net as a major meeting point for researchers and practitioners in the areas of natural and artificial cognitive systems.

Debates across disciplines will enrich researchers with complementary perspectives from diverse scientific fields. To help in this direction of tight interaction, the workshop will accept a maximum of 50 communications.

AND Corporation has developed and commercialized a process known as Holographic Neural Technology.

AND Corporation has developed a rather complete neuro-morphic model of the brain, based upon Holographic/Quantum neural technology (“H.Ne.T.”). They have been distributing these systems for some years now. Details are avaikable at http://www.andcorporation.com/.

John Sutherland from AND Corporation describes the relationship between H.Ne.T. technology and consciousness as follows: